Millions of cows (and sheep) have been killed in Great Britian
and other European countries in the past 15 years to preven the spread of
two diseases; millions of chickens have been killed in China for the same
reasons. The first is known as "Mad Cow", or Bovine
Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in which actual holes are found in
the animal's brains. The human form of this goes by the less-obvious name
of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. What causes
these is an abnormal protein called a "prion". Tissues from the brain
and spine contaminate and mix with other parts and non-infected cows at the
slaughterhouse. The cows are getting this because people have been grinding
up sick cows and feeding them back to more cows. This is not the way nature
intended, so mutations have arrived.

Altho it has been said that Mad Cow hasn't reached the US yet,
it has . I was told of a case in Connecticut several years ago from the sister
of the woman who died of it. She gave me the details of her sister's death,
which were horrifying. Although it was originally reported as "Human Mad
Cow", someone(s) quickly told the media and hospital to shut the hell
up about it and it was quickly "unreported". The death was officially
listed as "complications from pnumonia". She looked at the local paper's
archives for the original articles and even went to the hospital to request
the records and found they were "just not there". <
There was also a report from suburban Chicago, Illinois of a man who died
if Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease in the last few years which left investigators
baffled. It was eventually traced to a bag of dry fertilizer he had used on
his rose bushes. He contracted the disease by breathing in some of the powder
as he spread it on the garden.

People in the Southern United States in recent years have been
warned not to eat squirrel brains, a sort of delicacy in some parts (hey, I know,
I know...it's SICK! I'm a Northerner!) because of Creuzfeldt-Jakob ... basically
Mad Squirrel Disease.

Morons out there will tell you "Stop Eating Beef!"
and think that'll about cover it. do it. Problem is, we use our beloved cow
for things you can't even begin to imagine; cow is literally in everything
we touch. You have to wonder, when looking the list over, where we'd be with
out the Cow. Yet who hasn't mocked one by yelling a loud "MOO!"
out a car window when driving past a field of them? (Oh yeah...like I'm the
only one who's done that?!)

If you take a look at where we CAN find cow, you'll see no one
in any industrialized country is safe. The problem lies with the fact that
a great amount of these cow by-products are imported from other countries,
bought from the cheapest sellers; usually foreign countries who have little
to no controls or standards for their products. This disease could be passed
along unchecked in so many ways; even the number of people who must handle
these by-products who work in the below industries, and the industries that
deal with it before it even gets to those people, is staggering.

Here's a list of products that use cows.
(Thanks to Hannah for her input!)